The Influencer

Just because you don't have a "C" at the beginning of your title doesn't mean you're not influential.

By Dian Schaffhauser

07/01/2002

When outsiders like magazine publishers and product vendors study the
world of IT, a great debate always rages over who makes purchasing decisions.
Is it the CTO? The CIO? The line-of-business manager? The MIS manager?
And on and on.

In fact, IT purchasing decisions are often made not by so-called C-level
folks, but by the technical people in the trenches. That’s you. You’re
what I call an influencer. That means when a problem comes up in your
organization, you pinpoint the answer, research solutions, make recommendations—and
fill out the check request. You do everything but sign it. You heavily
influence your company’s technical strategies by structuring the problem
and formulating the responses—and by understanding the details behind
the decisions.

According to our latest readership survey, the organizations where you
work have an average of 249 servers and 3,441 workstations. Those are
not insignificant numbers.

You're
what I call an influencer.
When a problem comes up, you pinpoint the answer, identify approaches,
research solutions, and fill out the check
requests.

The same survey says a quarter of you work for Microsoft partner companies.
That means you have the power to effect decision-making in the companies
where you consult. And since the trend these days is toward outsourcing,
that influence will only grow.

Ironically, outsiders often have trouble understanding your influence.
Despite our title, only a fraction of our editorial pages every month
focuses on career and certification topics. The bulk of the magazine is
devoted to a mammoth number of product reviews, detailed technical coverage,
and hardcore how-to columns. We tailor the content to MCPs in the field.
You do far more on the job than prepare for your next exam. In fact, most
of you have trouble finding time to study at all—work is too demanding.

It’s time for you to proclaim your true value to your employers and the
outside world—and it’s not just as an MCSE. You’re the person who works
for a solution provider and is called to the client site to figure out
how to make the business work better. You’re the person who recognizes
the relative advantage of NAS over SAN and speaks up in the technical
meeting to point out the flaws in the thinking of the VP of technology.
You understand the details—and the tools—behind successful network migrations,
data transformation, desktop deployment, messaging, clustering, and a
hundred other technical topics. At the same time you’re doing what you
can to glean insights into how to talk to the business leaders, develop
ROI, and turn your operations into more than a cost center.

I believe you, the experienced, Windows networking professional, compose
a sleeper audience. If vendors truly understood how IT works within most
organizations, they’d realize the importance of decisions made by the
technical professionals who install, configure and support the networked
systems that make business work. When that day comes, expect software
and hardware companies alike to start wooing you with a vengeance.